One of the things I love doing lately is taking my time. If I were a superstitious sort of romantic, I would think that the very molecules of the South had invaded my psyche and pulled time in a slow, thready, sugary-grainy taffy, forcing my limbs to wade through molasses-years’ worth of contemplatory seconds and minutes.
But I’m not the superstitious sort, so I’ll just chalk this one up to, sure, being in the South. Period.
You see, this is the place I was never really meant to be. Yet here I am. I am here in spite of expectations, and in spite of various desires. Hell, after my wacky Californian adventures, I decided to be here twice.
And so I savor that – I take my errands around town seriously: I go to the bank, I go to the store, I make little lists, I don’t overburden myself with the notion that there’s too much to do and no time to do it in. Things can wait, because things will make themselves known as important. It’s a luxury, and I am luxuriating.
There’s a lot of people, family members, a few others, who haven’t quite made the leap with me, for whatever reason. I have pushed people away, I have definitely drawn lines in the sand. Part self-respect, part survival, part simple frustration. Tiny flecks of self-doubt and regret sometimes flavor things, but I’ve become more comfortable with the idea that we’re living in many worlds.
The me that you’d love me to be … she exists. She’s just not here with you now.
It’s hard to hold this steady, this sure grip on a life chosen for reasons that make sense to me, instead of giving the lion’s share to what Other People Think. Being closeted most of my younger life had a lot to do with it, as did having a creative background with a drive to do art and performance at the expense of a great many other things. It was a challenge, shaking this feeling that I was passionate about the wrong things.
End of the year noodling has me throwing skeins of memory nets back over previous chapters in my life: where I stayed near my childhood, where I stayed in that relationship, where I stuck with that horrible desk job, all compromises, all passive hope woven in that things would break, and I would be free to rise, to swim to the surface, to break into the air, gasping, lungs clear, sky blue.
And that was one of the things about Dad, you know. We didn’t get along. We probably had a million things in common, and many of them still might occur to me down the road, but our relationship was not very productive, was not really a path we were journeying together. Before I came out to him as queer, every mass e-mail to his ‘mailing list’ about the ‘gay agenda’ broke my heart, every single one. I would hear from other people about how I was a disappointment to him, and how he was worried that my liberal arts college was going to brainwash me into becoming, I don’t know, a pinko commie? Never you mind that I went to a state university with a population at that time of over 25 thousand students!
Those were the things I carried with me as I went to work and eked out a living and did all the things I loved in the evenings and on weekends. My passions were my hobbies, and I was supposed to be happy with that.
Every day when I walk into work I am walking right into an environment where I have things to do that are challenging and sometimes quite tedious, and certainly hard work when it calls for it. But it’s also fun, and it also makes sense to me, and even though I’m not really getting to tell stories right now, or getting to create massive amounts of content, I am in the middle of a splendid chaos, and I am surrounded by good people.
And that was one of the things about my Dad, you know. He’d had these mini strokes, and suddenly I was flying to California every week to work, and he wanted to take me out to dinner, to celebrate. His voice had gone a place I didn’t expect to hear for another twenty years – wobbly, soft enunciation, old. But he looked just fine, a bit greyer, and he was tidily dressed, still driving his car. We went across the street from the 42 office to Gordon Biersch, and I regaled him and his girlfriend with tales about the job, about what it was like to travel to different cities and create puzzle pieces out of buildings and signs. What it was like to make a fictional city come alive for thousands and millions of people.
Occasionally, he’d … yawn, or something, a strange open-mouthed stretch of a tic – I can only assume it was a side effect of the stroke, these strange, sudden out of context facial expressions. But then it would be gone, and there’d be Dad, smiling at me with a light in his eyes that I never really got to see turned towards me before. I mean, there I was, funky colors dyed into my hair, heavier than he’d ever seen me, so obviously not any sort of model for conservative values, but … he looked proud of me. I was simultaneously ecstatic and heartbroken. Finally, I was a daughter he wanted to know, a daughter he appreciated. And yet it had taken such an inroads on his health to meet with me on the path, to smile in wonder at what were truly accomplishments in my life.
The question knocks around my head like plastic blocks tumbling in a clothes dryer, ugly and meaningless when spoken: why should this come now, when it’s so, so late? Why would it take this for him to see that I have worth?
He had a lot on his plate at that time – a host of frustrations with this terrible neurological decay that is so rare they still don’t have numbers for it, the complete cessation of activity in his life, the drawing inwards of all his expression as his muscles stopped behaving, as his speech became reduced to half-formed vowel sounds with hints of consonance. I accepted that celebratory dinner as a hint of what might have been in another life. My pride and my defensiveness were resolutely stacked in a back room while I spent what precious little time I had away from the office driving over an hour each way in a busted car to see him for a few hours here and there. It was never enough, as it happens, but that’s not really even a story for another day. It’s memory trapped in the murky vile fog of when things got so much worse, so much more personal.
Through the worst of it I held onto those moments at dinner, of Dad honestly smiling at me, in spite of himself, in spite of our crazy political differences, in spite of all logic, I had this guy rooting for me, understanding that I was really doing something I loved, and well.
The first thing he did when he saw me that night was to hand me a bottle of champagne in congratulations, and then to awkwardly kiss me on the cheek.
The bottle’s sitting in my fridge. Part of me wants to have a quiet toast sometime soon, to the rare moments when the path sincerely taken can trump every other path chosen for you, and it’s obvious to everyone. Dad and I were different and conflicted in very important ways, and I will never gloss over that, but at least I got a taste of what so many other daughters get to feel.
I carry that along with the heartbreak and frustration. All a part of this life, this too short life.